Can I vent a little? Thanks. It’s become almost conventional wisdom among liberals these days that the US Senate is flagrantly unfair and undemocratic because of its built-in bias toward Republicans. Why, Republicans control the Senate with seats that represent less than half of all Americans! It’s become something of an all-purpose excuse for Democratic losses of the past few years, and it needs to stop. First off, here’s a chart showing control of the Senate since World War II:

Over the past 75 years, Democrats have controlled the Senate 24 times compared to 13 for Republicans.

But wait. Most of that is ancient history. How about counting since 1980? Then it’s 11 to 9 in favor of Republicans.

But wait again! Really, we should count since the Gingrich Revolution delivered the South fully into the hands of Republicans. If we do that, it’s 8 to 5 in favor of Republicans.

These are hardly tremendous odds against Democratic control. But of course this is just background. The real complaint is that the Senate favors small states—which is true—and thus favors Republicans—which isn’t. There’s nothing about a small population that automatically makes a state Republican. Delaware’s Senate delegation is Democratic. Oregon is Democratic. Hawaii is Democratic. New Mexico is Democratic. Ditto in reverse for big states: Texas is Republican. Florida is Republican. Ohio is Republican. Georgia is Republican.

It’s not size that matters. What makes a state Republican is simple: conservative voters. Or, in any case, voters who are more conservative than your average Democrat. So what do you do if you want to win more of these states? The same thing political parties have been doing for millennia: You appeal to the people in these states with policies that they like.

But for some reason the loudest contingent of liberals these days seems to think this is an outrageous burden. The problem is that US politics over the past few decades has become less and less about economic issues and more and more about social issues, and that makes elections into moral crusades. And that, in turn, means that compromise is all but impossible. As recently as a decade ago, for example, Senate Democrats unanimously supported the “Gang of Eight” compromise immigration bill. Today it’s unlikely a similar bill would even attract a majority of Democrats. In fact, many of the immigration plans that were floated during the Democratic primary this year came within shouting distance of supporting open borders.

Democrats could obviously win more swing states if they wanted to, but it would mean making compromises on hot-button social issues like abortion, guns, police, religion, immigration, and so forth. Instead, the party has moved left on these issues and activists are now infuriated that it’s paying a price among center-left voters in swing states.

But that’s politics. Sure, small states tend to be more rural, which makes them generally more conservative. That’s a plus for Republicans. On the other hand, the United States is becoming steadily less white, which is a plus for Democrats. Both parties have lots of headwinds and tailwinds. There’s nothing new about this.

So please, for the love of God, stop whining about how unfair the Senate is. The Senate isn’t going away, and that’s that. What’s more, liberals have done just fine in the Senate over the past century, and they’ve done it the old-fashioned way: by running on policies that appeal to more people in more states than the other guys.

There’s no law that says we can’t do that again. The only law is the one that says you have to accept a tradeoff between your ideal policy preferences and your desire to win the most voters. This is not even Politics 101. It’s more like Politics As Practiced Since the Wheel Was Invented. And it’s the only guaranteed way to win.

I call this Still Life With Tomatoes and Some Kind of Squashy Looking Thing. It is a meditation on how even the bounty freely given by the land can fade into the inky darkness of despair when hope fades. Alternatively, it’s a demonstration of getting a lot of contrast when you underexpose an image and then use Photoshop to make it even more shadowy and dramatic. Your call.

Imago via ZUMA

I’ve been perplexed by the ruckus surrounding President Trump’s ban on TikTok and the subsequent drama surrounding its sale to a US company, but for the most part I didn’t really pay a lot of attention to it. The Chinese government seemed oddly passive about the whole thing, and TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, sort of shrugged and went about finding a buyer.

So fine. Whatever. But seriously, wtf is this?

President Trump has given his “blessing” to Oracle’s partnership with ByteDance to operate TikTok, but his claim that the companies would finance a $5-billion “patriotic” education fund has raised questions about the deal to allow the app to operate in the U.S.

….“We have a deal worked out,” Trump told supporters in North Carolina on Saturday. “They are going to pay $5 billion into a fund for education so we can educate people as to the real history of our country. We are getting very close to that deal.”…ByteDance, Oracle and Walmart, which is part of the TikTok deal, agreed to create an initiative after Trump made the last-minute request. But they have had no discussions about a $5-billion commitment or any other amount, according to people familiar with the situation.

ByteDance and its new partners will not create an education program that seeks to teach American history in a manner that is tailored to any specific bias, said two people with direct knowledge of the matter.

Trump has been blathering about some kind of  $5 billion “gift” or “fine” or whatnot that ByteDance would have to pay in order to have a deal approved, but I figured this was just the usual Trump prattle, like Mexico paying for the wall or seeing too many Mercedes sedans on the streets of Manhattan. But apparently it’s real. And it’s going to fund a pet project of Trump’s—well, a project that’s been one of his pets for about a month or so, ever since he learned that “critical race theory” and the 1619 Project made great punching bags among his white audiences on the campaign trail.

It’s not unusual to put conditions on merger approvals. But on breakups ordered by the government? And specifically a condition that’s completely unrelated to the companies involved or their previous actions? And even more specifically, a condition that basically boils down to a Trump slush fund of some kind? Trump’s original demand that TikTok’s buyer should “reimburse” the US Treasury in return for being allowed to finalize the purchase went nowhere—probably because it was illegal and made no sense anyway—but if anything, his latest scam is even worse.

What the hell is going on here?

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through September 20. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

In Part 2 of my great robot trilogy,¹ I talked a bit about the steady demise of Moore’s Law, which ever since 1965 has predicted that computing power doubles every 18 months or so. Obviously Moore’s Law was good for artificial intelligence, which requires vast computing power, and its death is just as obviously bad news. However, there are many ways to skin a cat, and raw, general computing power is only one of them. In the Wall Street Journal this weekend, Christopher Mims introduces us to a replacement for Moore’s Law:

I call it Huang’s Law, after Nvidia Corp. chief executive and co-founder Jensen Huang….Between November 2012 and this May, performance of Nvidia’s chips increased 317 times for an important class of AI calculations, says Bill Dally, chief scientist and senior vice president of research at Nvidia. On average, in other words, the performance of these chips more than doubled every year, a rate of progress that makes Moore’s Law pale in comparison.

Nvidia’s specialty has long been graphics processing units, or GPUs, which operate efficiently when there are many independent tasks to be done simultaneously. Central processing units, or CPUs, like the kind that Intel specializes in, are on the other hand much less efficient but better at executing a single, serial task very quickly. You can’t chop up every computing process so that it can be efficiently handled by a GPU, but for the ones you can—including many AI applications—you can perform it many times as fast while expending the same power.

…Experts agree that the phenomenon I’ve labeled Huang’s Law is advancing at a blistering pace. However, its exact cadence can be difficult to nail down. The nonprofit Open AI says that, based on a classic AI image-recognition test, performance doubles roughly every year and a half. But it’s been a challenge even agreeing on the definition of “performance.” A consortium of researchers from Google, Baidu, Harvard, Stanford and practically every other major tech company are collaborating on an effort to better and more objectively measure it.

Another caveat for Huang’s Law is that it describes processing power that can’t be thrown at every application. Even in a stereotypically AI-centric task like autonomous driving, most of the code the system is running requires the CPU, says TuSimple’s Mr. Hou. Dr. Dally of Nvidia acknowledges this problem, and says that when engineers radically speed up one part of a calculation, whatever remains that can’t be sped up naturally becomes the bottleneck.

This is how we’re going to get the processing power needed to develop true AI. General purpose CPUs may be close to their ultimate limits, but AI is so important that it’s worth investing lots of money in specialized hardware (and software) for highly specific neural tasks. At the moment, we’re repurposing graphics chips, which turn out to be (a) well suited for many AI applications, and (b) still have a lot of headroom to deliver better and better performance. In time, we’ll develop chips that are even more specialized, something that Google is already working on.

So don’t cry for the death of Moore’s Law. It was great while it lasted, but its end is far from the end of high-power computing. AI is coming, and when it does its hardware foundations will most likely look nothing like today’s generic computers. Huang’s Law now rules our world.

¹Part 1 is here. Part 3 is still a couple of years away.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through September 19. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

And now for everybody’s favorite monthly (more or less) feature: my M-protein levels. This is a marker for the cancer load in my bone marrow, and the lower the number the better. This month it’s basically flat and holding at a pretty reasonable level, so that’s good news:

The bad news, as usual, is that I continue taking the evil dex, which has lately turned into the chaotic evil dex. I take it twice a week, and sometimes it puts me to sleep and sometimes it keeps me awake. That would be OK if there were any way to predict which it would be, but I haven’t figured anything out on that score. And that’s not even the worst. During the day, I very reliably crash two days after taking the dex, and lately “crash” means a deep sleep for upwards of six or eight hours, even though I’m taking a tiny dose. It’s mysterious as hell.

POSTSCRIPT: For those of you who have asked after my mother, she’s doing great and is nearly 100 percent recovered from whatever her mystery ailment was. While my sister and I were taking care of her I tried to introduce her to the wonders of American fast food, but I fear that it was for naught. Now that she’s cooking for herself again, I’m pretty sure she hasn’t so much as ordered up a pizza from an outside vendor.

This is a meaningless Brazilian stock shot of some pharmaceuticals. It's a good match for a story about the meaningless Trump pharmaceutical plan.Aloisio Mauricio/Fotoarena via ZUMA

The New York Times reports that although President Trump was close to a deal with pharmaceutical companies that would reduce drug costs by $150 billion, the deal broke apart at the last minute when he also insisted that they pay for $100 “cash cards” for all seniors before the election. But why was this a deal breaker?

Some of the drugmakers bridled at being party to what they feared would be seen as an 11th-hour political boost for Mr. Trump, the people familiar with the matter said….One drug company executive said they worried about the optics of having the chief executives of the country’s leading pharmaceutical makers stand with the president in the Rose Garden as he hoisted an oversized card and gloated about helping a crucial bloc of voters.

Observant readers should immediately notice two suspicious things about this narrative. First, $150 billion is more than pharma companies earn from the entire American market. A deal of that size would wipe out their profits completely.

Second, why would pharma companies be OK with a Rose Garden event celebrating a $150 billion deal but then balk at a Rose Garden event that included the $100 cards? A Rose Garden event sounds pretty good! Does anyone really believe that it was because they were squeamish about helping the president shortly before an election? That doesn’t seem much like the pharma industry we all know and hate, does it?

Here’s the deal. The Times doesn’t mention this, but that $150 billion is over ten years. I don’t know precisely how that would be structured, but payouts like this are almost always back-loaded. It would probably look something like this:

And keep in mind that this is merely a vague promise. In real life, the pharma industry would almost certainly find a way to delay and complicate things so that they’d end up spending far less than that.

Now, how much would those cards cost? There are 60 million seniors on Medicare, so it pencils out to $6 billion. That’s three times as much as the deal’s first-year spending, and there would be no way to wiggle out of it. It’s concrete money that has to be paid out before the rest of the deal is even finalized.

You should dismiss the pharma industry’s fanciful story that they were reluctant to stand in the Rose Garden and be praised to the skies as good corporate citizens. More likely, they never really planned to pay out very much on the deal and definitely didn’t want to be on the hook for an immediate $6 billion. That represents something on the order of 10 percent of their US profits. That’s a bad look on the ol’ balance sheet.

Bottom line: Pharma companies were never going to spend $150 billion in a year. What they were really willing to spend was probably so small that even a $6 billion down payment was too much for them to swallow. Instead, they shrugged and decided to accept Trump’s longtime threat to carry out a plan that would force their US pricing on certain drugs to match their pricing in Europe. This would only be a “pilot program” anyway, and if it ever goes anywhere the industry will spend years tying it up in court. It’s a way better deal than the one Trump tried to force on them.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through September 18. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

France is looking really bad. Their cases have skyrocketed and now their death toll is following the familiar start of an exponential curve. Spain and France are now the only two large countries to join us in having a rebound after cases and deaths had declined substantially. How many others will follow?

Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died today, leaving the court with only three liberals. If Republicans successfully confirm a replacement, the court will have a 6-3 conservative majority that will almost certainly overturn Roe v. Wade and make abortions all but impossible to get for millions of women.Jeff Malet/Newscom via ZUMA

Rarely have I been so close and yet so far away in a prediction. This was me yesterday:

Abortion May Be the Sleeper Issue of 2020

With the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg today, Republicans now have the opportunity to replace her with a nominee whose anti-abortion credentials are impeccable. This means that everything has changed and Roe v. Wade is no longer a sleeper. It’s now the primary issue of the 2020 election. If a new justice, as part of a 6-3 conservative majority, leads to Roe’s overturning, abortion will return to being a state issue and at least half of all states will probably ban it outright. Another dozen will likely put additional restrictions on it. Millions of women will find it all but impossible to get abortions if this happens.

(As an aside, liberals can complain all they want that Mitch McConnell would be a hypocrite for blocking a Supreme Court nomination during Barack Obama’s final year while allowing one during Donald Trump’s final year, but Mitch McConnell doesn’t care. He’s going to do it and that’s that. Still, liberals should complain anyway. Not only is it worthwhile to make McConnell look bad, but if it’s done right it’s even possible—barely—that it could persuade four Republican senators to block a nomination. The odds are long, but it’s worth a try.)

Obviously firm pro-life voters and firm pro-choice voters have already made up their minds about how to vote on abortion issues, but there are still plenty of voters in the middle and it’s genuinely unclear how to appeal to them. Consider the following:

• Only about a third of Americans think abortion should be banned in all or most cases.
• On the other hand, a majority believe abortion rules should be stricter.
• About 60 percent want Roe v. Wade to stay on the books. Only about 30 percent want it overturned.

Republicans have a very fine line to walk on abortion. They’re going to be under considerable pressure to nominate a justice who will, at a minimum, flat-out overturn Roe v. Wade. In fact, social conservatives would ideally like to see Roe overturned and onerous restrictions placed on states at the same time. The nominee, of course, will go through the usual kabuki dance of swearing that they’ve barely even heard of Roe v. Wade, let alone formed an opinion about it, but that hardly matters. What matters, since everyone knows this is a charade, is what social conservatives say. If they go overboard on their demands, it could turn off a big chunk of voters.

Democrats have the same problem in reverse. If they stick to supporting Roe, everything is probably fine. But if they start yelling about declaring war on Republicans and packing the Supreme Court if Trump’s nominee is confirmed, that could turn off a big chunk of voters too.

For liberals, then, the best strategy is likely the following:

• Behind the scenes, Democratic senators should quietly make it clear that confirmation of a Republican nominee does indeed mean war. But they should do it in a way that keeps it out of the public eye.
• Publicly, Democrats should hold their noses and appeal to voters in the middle by talking about how abortion is a heart-rending decision, but one that should be left up to a woman and her doctor.
• At the same time, Democrats should try to figure out a way to bait conservatives into going full lunatic over abortion. This would go a long way toward turning off a lot of people.

Does it make any sense that an election that a few hours ago seemed to be about everything at once has suddenly condensed into one that will probably end up being decided by 46 days of arguments about abortion above all else? Of course not. But that’s the situation we’re in. We have to deal with it.